Behind the Urals

Behind the Urals PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253351258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
John Scott's classic account of his five years as a worker in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, first published in 1942, is enhanced in this edition by Stephen Kotkin's introduction, which places the book in context for today's readers; by the texts of three debriefings of Scott conducted at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1938 and published here for the first time; and by a selection of photographs showing life in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. No other book provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five-Year Plan.

Behind the Urals

Behind the Urals PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253351258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
John Scott's classic account of his five years as a worker in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, first published in 1942, is enhanced in this edition by Stephen Kotkin's introduction, which places the book in context for today's readers; by the texts of three debriefings of Scott conducted at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1938 and published here for the first time; and by a selection of photographs showing life in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. No other book provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five-Year Plan.

Behind the Urals

Behind the Urals PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781773238593
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
John Scott left the University of Wisconsin for the Soviet Union in 1931. Appalled by the depression and attracted by what he had heard concerning the effort to create a "new society" in the Soviet Union, he obtained training as a welder and went abroad to join the great crusade. Assigned to construction of the new "Soviet Pittsburgh," Magnitogorsk, on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, the twenty-year-old was first an electric welder and then a foreman and chemist in a coke and chemicals by-products plant. He lived in a barracks, suffered cold and privation, studied evenings, married a Russian girl-in short, lived for five years as a Russian among Russians. No other description of life in a new steel city provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five Year Plan. Scott had a clear eye for detail and produced a chronicle that includes the ugliness and squalor as well as the endurance and dedication. Behind the Urals stands as a unique and revealing description of an iron age in an iron country.-Print ed. "Students reading Scott have come away with a real appreciation of the hardships under which these workers built Magnitogorsk and of the nearly incredible enthusiasm with which many of them worked."-Ronald Grigor Suny "A genuine grassroots account of Soviet life- a type of book of which there have been far too few."-William Henry Chamberlin, New York Times, 1943 "...a rich portrait of daily life under Stalin."-New York Times Book Review

Travels in Siberia

Travels in Siberia PDF Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429964316
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

Between Heaven and Hell

Between Heaven and Hell PDF Author: G. Diment
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137089148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Siberia has no history of independent political existence, no claim to a separate ethnic identity, and no clear borders. Yet, it could be said that the elusive country 'behind the Urals' is the most real and the most durable part of the Russian landscape. For centuries, Siberia has been represented as Russia's alter ego,as the heavenly or infernal antithesis to the perceived complexity or shallowness of Russian life. It has been both the frightening heart of darkness and a fabulous land of plenty; the 'House of the Dead' and the realm of utter freedom; a frozen wasteland and a colourful frontier; a dumping ground for Russia's rejects and the last refuge of its lost innocence. The contributors to Between Heaven and Hell examine the origin, nature, and implications of these images from historical, literary, geographical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives. They create a striking, fascinating picture of this enormous and mysterious land.

Beyond the Urals

Beyond the Urals PDF Author: Reggie Gibbs
Publisher: Life Rich Publishing
ISBN: 9781489732842
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Russia, 1942. Outside Stalingrad, Arkady's unit is ambushed and destroyed. The only survivor, the young soldier is faced with a choice: return to the war effort, or try and find his wife, Natasha, located in a factory city somewhere far to the east of the Ural Mountains. Disillusioned and hating the war, Arkady chooses the arduous task of searching for the only person he feels gives him peace. But as he embarks on thea perilous journey into Siberia's vastness, he unwittingly becomes enmeshed in a spiritual and political battle for his nation's soul, a battle being waged not only in the present, but also by towering figures from Russia's past. Meanwhile, Natasha struggles against her own loneliness and despair as intrigue develops around her city's eventual role in a post-war Soviet Union. Told in parallel, Arkady's journey and Natasha's trials form an allegory for the spirit's quest for peace in a world consumed with the pursuit of power. With the forces of history and the world aligned against the individual, how is victory claimed? To this, an unconventional answer is offered - an ancient crucifix. A sweeping portrait of Russia, Beyond the Urals is a journey into the soul itself, probing untouched regions, while exploring the forces vying to occupy and control them.

Stalin's Curse

Stalin's Curse PDF Author: Robert Gellately
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

Exodus and Its Aftermath

Exodus and Its Aftermath PDF Author: Albert Kaganovich
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299334503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
During World War II, some two million Jewish refugees relocated from the western regions of the USSR to the Soviet interior. Citizens in the Central Asian territories were at best indifferent—and at worst openly hostile—toward these migrants. Unpopular policies dictated that residents house refugees and share their limited food and essentials with these unwelcome strangers. When the local population began targeting the newcomers, Soviet authorities saw the antisemitic violence as discontentment with the political system itself and came down hard against it. Local authorities, however, were less concerned with the discrimination, focusing instead on absorbing large numbers of displaced people while also managing regional resentment during the most difficult years of the war. Despite the lack of harmonious integration, party officials spread the myth that they had successfully assimilated over ten million evacuees. Albert Kaganovitch reconstructs the conditions that gave rise to this upsurge in antisemitic sentiment and provides new statistical data on the number of Jewish refugees who lived in the Urals, Siberia, and Middle Volga areas. The book’s insights into the regional distribution and concentration of these émigrés offer a behind-the-scenes look at the largest and most intensive Jewish migration in history.

Venona

Venona PDF Author: John Earl Haynes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
This groundbreaking historical study reveals the shocking infiltration of Soviet spies in America—and the top-secret cryptography program that caught them. Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years. Hidden in a former girls’ school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the Soviet code, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide the most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage in the early Cold War years.

The Romanovs

The Romanovs PDF Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307266524
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
"The acclaimed author of Young Stalin and Jerusalem gives readers an accessible, lively account--based in part on new archival material--of the extraordinary men and women who ruled Russia for three centuries."--NoveList.

Siberia

Siberia PDF Author: Janet M. Hartley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300167946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Geschiedenis van de bevolking van Siberië.